Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember the 90s just fine, but i think MS also knows that they lucked out on the antitrust rulings with getting their fingers slapped. Also on top of it Gates isn't there in charge to be ruthless any more (and the competitors today knows the things to watch out for). But more importantly than all that... MS knows they aren't competing with other companies per-se but rather ecosystems, open source and developer min…
Yes, that's all fair. I know why the WinPhone fiasco happened: they, very reasonably, wanted to get everything on an NT base. WinPhone 7 was WinCE, WinPhone 8 was NT. I don't think they realised how many people used WinPhone 7 and were happy with it. Over here in Czechia, Windows phones were the main smartphones I saw when I moved here in 2014 -- Android and iOS were very rare, because they were very expensive. Windo…
When i mean lucked out i mean that they were lucky enough to have good enough lobbyists to pay their way out of their trouble.
Any company can become aggressive/shitty/evil depending on who runs things. I mean if we look at Suns legacy, Sun today is the biggest threat to open source we have (would would have thought about that in the 90s?).. sure it's really called Oracle now with Larry.E pulling the strings.
MS in the 80s and 90s had lucked in on their DOS deal and i think Gates in the back of his mind might was just watching all the time for threats coming and doing to MS what he did to IBM. But being facing a split-up i think Gates didn't see much point in "winning" any more since doing that would just lead to being big enough to actually be forced to divest things. (So he got bored and started doing other stuff, i know i would)
I think a comparison to the oil industry is apt, early oil was really ruthless in terms of competition (until the breakup of Standard Oil that really MS was the closest to becomming) but todays big-oil industry is quite evil but that is more the making of a collective greed of many middle to high managers and we're seeing the big IT firms approach that state quickly.